Disney gets more IP in front of more 13-25 year olds. This is a very impressionable age group, and can create life long fans. This is a good value proposition for Disney. Epic probably gets an increase in valuation -- lifeblood for tech companies.
Collaboration skins are massive for revenue. However, I'm concerned this relationship will force uncool collaborations with Fortnite and reduce it's appeal. Disney has had some flops recently. Long term the trick for Fortnite is to become the most sticky online videogame in history, with most games bleeding audience over time. Epic is more than just Fortnite, but I imagine this deal is entirely about Fortnite.
My kids already think many recent Fortnite collabs (Star Wars, Marvel, etc) are lame. Hasn't stopped them from playing though.
https://www.dexerto.com/fortnite/every-fortnite-collab-cross...
I had the same reaction 20 years ago to Kingdom Hearts.
Disney is definitely at risk of becoming irrelevant with their stale IP.
At risk? They haven’t had hit movie for years. They have destroyed just about everything they’ve touched, from Indiana Jones to Star Wars to Snow White.
I flagged this - it seems too clearly flame bait. If it was an honest mistake, my apologies. Disney had three movies in 2023 which took more than $200 million at the US box office
And how much did those movies cost to make? I think the movies you are referring to were expecting to make 500m or more. They needed to make about 500 to break even! Disney said have some successes last year. But they aren't as impressive as you might think
Box Office is not the yardstick disney uses, that's just the first phase of the disney wheel. They make oodles of money in merchandise and theme park content that's based on the same (expensive) IP as the movie. When they don't break even on the movie, they'll generally break even or make money on the IP behind the movie.
Here's the problem with that analysis, how do you attribute revenue to a specific movie? Will people attend the theme parks or spend more at them because of [movie X]? It's the same problem you have with streaming. Will people subscribe or stay subscribed to D+ longer because of [movie X]?
Until you can answer one or both in a repeatable, predictable way, we can wave our hands and say "it makes money later!" or "it doesn't make money later!" and neither is provable.
One other aspect that we CAN prove: streaming kills DVD sales. That's a revenue stream that is gone and won't be coming back so we have yet another deficit to fill.
Until then, Box Office and merchandising are the ONLY numbers that we, analysts, and stockholders can point at where "You put in $X and got out $Y" for their movie business. And as of right now, that puts Disney's 2023 numbers deeply negative.
Which is why Disney+ is its own streaming service. Keeps all the eggs in the same basket.
So far, streaming hasn't made nearly the same amount as DVD sales and it's ridiculously expensive to run one.
That said, licensing to other streaming services often does work. You get revenue for the cost of a contract vs having the infrastructure costs and nebulous ROI. You get the added benefit of direct attribution because you can tell "we licensed [movie X] for $X for Y years".
To be clear, I totally agree with you. I think the success of theme parks and merchandise has been covering up mediocre IP from Disney for a while, and that fact is dangerous to their future prospects.
However, trying to balance this critique with some fairness to their strategy, it is difficult to disambiguate "the strategy isn't working" from "the strategy is helping us float across some mediocre years until we chance upon the next Frozen". It's kind of like VC returns, where it's 10 "%" of their IP (Star Wars, Mickey, Frozen, Toy Story, Marvel, etc.) that drive 90% of their performance. 2023 was definitely a poor "vintage" for Disney IP.
That being said, Disney has rebounded from many spells of mediocrity, and their theme parks, merchandise, and old IP (now monetized through Disney+ as you say) have kept them afloat through those poor periods.
Most recently they've only been able to jump-start the IP engines through acquisition (Pixar 2006, Marvel in 2009). I'm not a Disney shareholder myself, but I agree that the IP tap seems to be running dry and that's very concerning. I don't think Epic Games has anywhere near the value ceiling that Marvel and Pixar did.
That would traditionally be the case, but the merchandising is bombing too, and (anecdata time) I can confirm this through personal observation: 80%-off sales of Star Wars merchandise in a local toy store, and my kids and their circle having a keen sense of which IP they like (unsurprising spoiler: it’s the stuff based on good movies, not the stuff based on bad movies).
I think the surest example of this is the Lego Star Wars toys more and more being obviously adult-targeted.
Not everything can be Frozen, but the pallet of Wish merchandise at Walmart is still there and now all marked down (except the Lego because they know that someone will buy it eventually for parts).
Elemental merchandising was completely non-existent and that was a mistake, people enjoyed that.
They were all flops. They cost massively more to film and to market than that. And remember theater owners get half of the gross.
As much as I despised for example the first new Star Wars, The Force Awakens:
"The film grossed $2.07 billion worldwide, breaking various box office records and becoming the highest-grossing film in the United States and Canada, the highest-grossing film of 2015, and the third-highest-grossing film at the time of its release"
People forget that the movie came out nine years ago and shouldn't pass for "recent years", which the discussion above is about. The movie also primarily sold through hype to kids who grew up with the prequels, which had little to do with the quality. People, including me, still lived in denial back then. It wasn't until the second movie that my friends realized how terrible Star Wars had become and promised to never watch a Disney movie at the cinema again. A reputation Disney seems to have embraced considering the countless discussions of their decline.
Well, part 2:
"It grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of 2017"
and part 3:
"grossed over $1.077 billion worldwide, making it the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2019 "
Cannot really be called flops either. And the Mandalorian is highly succesful as well. And probably some other movies, I don't know, I do not follow. My point is, that I share the criticism of how bad Star Wars became under Disney, I dropped out, after they seriously introduced yet another death star. But commercially they were highly succesful.
They were flops even if they made money because their expectations were so infinitely sky-high.
Force Awakens? Everyone who had ever seen Star Wars went to see it (extended family had a tradition of seeing Star Wars movies when they came out). Later ones didn’t have that, and we’ve never seen the last one.
Elemental obviously outperformed expectations but was no Toy Story. Wish is not doing well and looks unlikely to recover.
We’re long gone from the era of every single Disney (or Pixar) animated film being an absolute instant classic and powerhouse.
(Part of this may be the huge number of live action remakes - even if financially successful they seem entirely forgettable).
Star Wars is destroyed beyond redemption by now, and the same goes for Indiana Jones. Pixar is also on a downwards trajectory, and whoever says otherwise is deluding himself/herself.
Pixar is just a movie studio now, churning out basic animated movies. They’re no longer head-and-shoulders above everyone, and other studios are certainly competitive or even outclassing.
Turning Red and Teenage Kraken have a superficially similar plot and the Pixar one is much “better made” in many ways, but neither is earth-shattering.
Frozen is one of the newest entries out of any media franchise to gross more than $10B — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media.... More than Fortnite has grossed. Not too shabby.
Frozen came out ten years ago and frozen 2 came out five years ago. I think that qualifies as a few years. Granted life has been tough on the movies since some odd event in 2020
If you take "for years" to literally mean "more than one year", sure. I think it's colloquially understood to be far longer than that. "Encanto" came out in 2021 and I'd consider that a hit. The soundtrack saw wide play, everyone I know who's seen it loves it, and they're merchandising the hell out of it.
To be fair, I saw "Wish" with my family and we all enjoyed it, but it obviously didn't come close to "Frozen 2" numbers. They're not all hits. With animated film taking years to produce, those perhaps aren't the metric to use. It'll be another few years before the next major animated film by Disney is released.
The Marvel movies release more frequently and seem to print money. "Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3" came out last year and has done $845MM¹.
¹ -- https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2977202945/
Encanto was fun but it didn’t merchandise the way Frozen did (nothing before or after has, to be fair).
Keep an eye on the clearance aisles for a feel on how merchandising is going; wish is doing exceptionally bad.
I guess I don't know what we mean by "hit" then. I tried to address it from cultural impact, box office earnings, and movie quality. On any one of those criteria I don't think it's been that long since Disney has had a hit. If a film needs to push "Frozen" numbers to be a hit, then I'll concede they haven't had one in years.
It's relative. No-one else has produced a media franchise that earns as much or more than Disney any more recently.
Disney has also produced some of the most recent highest grossing box office films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films. Again, this is relative. We've just had a pandemic followed by writers and actors guild strikes.
Minions is damn close, however. Freaking billion dollar movies and infinite numbers of the yellow dudes everywhere.
I didn't know Pokémon is the single highest-grossing franchise. That's wild and kinda unexpected given its age relative to Mickey Mouse & Friends in 2nd.
Wait till you see what the original gameboy games sell for these days. If they are sealed you can buy a car for less.
a bit off topic, but the global cultural impact of Frozen on kindergarten girls is absolutely insane. we all have memories of whatever the trend was when were a specific age, but nearly every 3-6 year old girl on the planet knows everything there is to know about the Frozen universe and had managed to get hold of some piece of merchandise (even if it's only a hair clip). And it's been like that for the past 8 years!
Fortnite generated $5.5B in 2023 alone and is estimated at over $20B in lifetime revenue
According to that page, Frozen merchandise alone has grossed nearly as much in ten years as the entire Star Trek franchise in almost sixty.
Presumably not adjusted for inflation, but still impressive.
I was surprised to see how much they spend for their movies. We talk about billion dollars and more they put into a single movie.
They've had several hits over the past few years, what nonsense are you spreading? Encanto and Turning Red are both great
When a company is spending more to make a movie than they earn with the movie it's no success just a lot of bought buzz
Encanto: $150m budget vs $250m box office.
So again, "no hit movies" is easily disproven with 10s of time to look into it.
A movie needs to bring in twice its budget to be profitable[1] is the common rule of thumb. The budget doesn't include things like marketing, and the fact that the box office is shared with the theatre owner.
So in your example, it potentially lost money for Disney. The wikipedia article almost says as much [2]
"Although it underperformed at the box office ..."
[1] https://gizmodo.com/how-much-money-does-a-movie-need-to-make...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encanto
Was Encanto the one they dumped on Disney+ real quick? It might have strongly affected popularity of the song (which is catchy as all hell, and can stand with Let It Go) since that was perhaps the peak.
None of the recent Disney animated movies have been “direct to DVD” terrible but they haven’t been exceptionally better than everything else.
It used to be that everyone basically considered Disney (and upstart Pixar) to be at the top of the class, and even extremely successful movies like Despicable Me to be a tier or two below.
Well this is just straight up false. Moana was a massive success. Frozen is a monstrous success for them. Star Wars not being a success is objectively false. The Force Awakens is the second best selling Star Wars movie of all time.
Moana came out almost 8 years ago! The force awakens is even older. I think you are proving the OPs point.
And they're making a live action one baby!
Live action remakes are the new “safe sequel”.
I think they should be compared to how well a literal rerelease of the original would do.
I think part of the evidence is just how absolutely long lived Frozen 1 has been. Nothing has been able to even come close to unseating that, not even its sequel (they were very smart to keep everything similar enough so that Frozen 2 merchandise can substitute for Frozen 1 in a kid’s eye).
It’s very indicative that people jump to movies that have been out for a decade or more, and probably can’t even name most of the more recent releases.
By what metric was Star Wars not a hit movie
By comparison to the previous two trilogies, and by performance of offshoots resulting in cancellations.
It was supposed to kick off a Marvell-style universe of infinite blockbusters. It didn’t.
That's not the definition of a flop though
Avatar 2 came out just over a year ago is one of the highest grossing movies of all time.
Both avatar movies are somehow insanely high grossing and apparently nobody remembers them at all. It’s a skill set to be sure.
If I had a nickel for every time I've heard someone singing that one song from Encanto I'd be able to buy Disney.
are we really gonna make up things that are easily disprovable?
And yet they're still incredibly relevant...
Hit movies don’t really seem to matter to Disney in the grand scheme of things. It’s more about selling merchandise of their already established brands.
If instead of buying IP and stealing from public domain works they invested more into creating new IP they could actually make a lot of money.
I'm sick of them being allowed to increase their entertainment monopoly on children instead of being told to just create new original works. It's not like they have a shortage of talented people...
It is not possible to steal from the public domain. That's the entire point of it.
Go try to produce something based around the public domain story Cinderella.
I doubt that Disney would take this kindly or lightly.
That's the entire point of the post that you are responding to.
There’s a French live action Beauty and the Beast which was rereleased in the US to take advantage of the hype around Disney’s remake - and it’s actually darn good for a $5 supermarket checkout movie.
Disney sued nobody.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella#Works_based_on_th...
You mean like Andrew Lloyd Webbers musical Bad Cinderella?
It's stealing in the cultural appropriation sense, not the copyright sense.
When you create a new work based off a public domain work, you own what you added to that work. If your adaptation happens to be extremely successful, that effectively recopyrights the character, because the version people care about is the one you own. If someone else wants to use the public domain character, they have to aggressively distance their use of that character from yours.
Disney spent decades re-imagining Europe's folk tales[0] through his lens. Their movies are the ones people think about when you mention Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio, etc. Notably, the visual designs are unique enough to get independent copyright protection. So independent uses of those characters don't look like themselves.
This, BTW, is why anyone who wants to renounce copyright over their creative work should opt for CC-BY-SA and not a public domain dedication. Share-alike clauses prevent this sort of gradual appropriation.
[0] as filtered/censored thru the Brothers Grimm
The material which was public domain is still public domain, Disney did not “re-copyright” anything. Just google how many different versions of Pinocchio has been made independently from Disney. Gulliermo del Toro won an oscar for his version. If you havent seen that it is your own fault, not the fault of Disney or copyright law.
Stephen Sondheim had a pretty succesful musical based on Grimms tales.
But yeah, if you want people to care about your version, you have to bring something new to the table.
Well, I agree with that. But very likely not for the same reasons you do.
Getting their cronies in congress to extend copyright protections from 14 years to 100 years is stealing from the public domain.
What public domain works have their recent movies been based off of?
Outside of their reimaginings/reboots, I can't think of a single recent movie that isn't an original work.
And that doesn't include things like LucasFilm, Marvel and Pixar which are, obviously, original and still part of Disney.
Tangled (Repunzel), Moana (uses and remixes actual Polynesian myths), Frozen (based on the snow queen), Peter Pan, Little Mermaid - a stack of recent Disney movies have been based on existing IP. You just don't notice because they culturally steamroll the originals.
The most recent movie Wish - is just callbacks to other Disney movies, so does it count as original IP?
And this excludes their reboots - but also excludes Pixar which has done some original albeit lacklustre stuff recently.
Peter Pan is a 70-year old movie. Little Mermaid is 25 years old.
There have also been many, many original movies released in that time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Pictures...
The vast majority of recent Disney content is original.
You're thinking of Mulan, not The Little Mermaid.
Oh god I misread 89 as 99. Even I didn’t realize it was that old.
As far as Frozen goes, at least they got something new to replace the Norway exhibit at Epcot, because it got so old and stale, that Norway disowned it, and refused to pay for the renewal
Frozen is just Norwegian propaganda and you’ll not convince me otherwise.
I wonder if anyone has worked out the actual dollar effect it is has had on Norwegian tourism.
IMO, their biggest problem is moving away from public domain works.
When kingdom hearts was released I got my first glimpse of how some people seem to throw their logic and taste out the window for Disney. It just seemed the dumbest thing to me. And why was the sword a key.. [edit: this was my teenage selfs opinion]
Some people like goofy mashup fun.
There's a ton of people who apparently really liked Kingdom Hearts.
It's pretty elitist to consider some IP too sacred to remix.
I only played Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 on the Playstation 2 as a teenager, and I did enjoy them while playing, but I have to admit that I have absolutely no idea what the hell happened story-wise by the end of the second game. The story just got increasingly convoluted and harder to follow, and the juxtaposition of serious Final Fantasy characters and Disney characters never really stopped being funny to me.
100% agreed on the story. There’s a recap video that’s probably not too hard to find on youtube which takes 30 minutes to explain the story up to the start of KH3 and I remember a predictable amount of it. There’s also this gem: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fCWjSOSWiUw
I only know enough about what “Aqua got ‘Norted” means to put an apostrophe in front of ‘Norted. (Xehanort possesses people or whatever.) I also literally never saw Aqua in any game I played before KH3, except maybe as an extra I didn’t notice.
Somewhere in the middle between the serious recap and the short joke remains this incredible video essay trying to explain the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwEwxKkCGJE
I didn't play KH for the story; it was just a fun ARPG. I couldn't tell you the plot to the Mana games either, and they had some ridiculous stuff too (traveling by cannon?)
Everyone in my friend group considered it a runaway hit. They all played a ton.
I was amazed.
Heh, not sure if pun intended but this made me giggle
Does it feature Jesus of Nazareth?
The first KH was fun I guess. And the combat mechanics Square made for KH are now the standard in Final Fantasy. But the story of KH went completely off the rails in all the sequels and spinoffs and I don't understand how anyone still cares about the story anymore.
To me at least, I liked Kingdom Hearts as a kid despite the Disney stuff, not thanks to it. I played it after Final Fantasy IX and X so I really enjoyed the change from turn-based combat.
surprisingly one of the simpler questions to answer. The Keyblade is the key that can open (or close) any door. And that was the theme of the first Kingdom Hearts: doors. the big villians plan is to destroy all worlds by opening the door to the Dark World and flooding the existing Light dimension with hoards of monsters. you also spend a lot of time closing off the doors to the heart of the world to protect their cores (monsters destroy core = destroyed world).
In addition to bashing enemies and being a large narrative hook, it's a nifty explanation for why you are able to simply tap on a chest and open anything you want. Or break and enter into a bunch of buildings (although the game forgets constantly that it can do that).
KH is a beautiful mess that makes absolutely no sense at all, from the idea to the execution, a complete fever dream that is somehow a very enjoyable experience, but only if you embrace the silliness of it all.
If you're a teenager that may be much easier... or much harder, in cases such as yours.
Because it was a really fun action RPG with camera control issues, that then got fixed in Kingdom Hearts II (actually sooner with Final Mix Plus I think but most people weren’t importing that). It started life as a collab, and it took on an identity of its own almost from your first moment in the game. I literally don’t have a conception of what Donald or Goofy are like outside of Kingdom Hearts anymore, well except for Donald’s contribution to the Ducking Hardcore Mix of It’s a Small World.
IP don’t make the game. The game makes the game.
Cynical answer: a big key is less scary to the soccer moms buying this stuff for their kids (than a sword).
The thing about Kingdom Hearts is you assume it's a vapid Disney corporate tie-in, but then you play it and realize it's actually a vapid Square Enix corporate tie-in. That's the actual draw for Kingdom Hearts fans: an absolutely incomprehensible mess of a plot[0] that just so happens to use a shitton of Disney and Final Fantasy characters.
[0] "Simple and clean is the way it should be..."
Never got to play it, but I always loved “Simple and Clean.” Sounds like I got the best experience of the game.
More or less yes. 1+2 are decent, but Simple and Clean is more powerful than either game combined.
the lyrics you quoted are actually: "Simple and clean is the way that you′re making me feel tonight."
Tying in the lyrics was an excellent touch
I was a bit mystified by the appeal of kingdom of hearts too… but the fans I knew loved it so they must have done something right.
I’m not a disney fan but I enjoyed those games. They’re just good action RPGs with fresh advancement bonuses. Very Square Enix, which makes sense, of course.
KH3 also made me realize that they can start to target child and adult fans via recently popular titles (e.g. Frozen) and ~30 years ago popular titles (e.g. Toy Story), respectively.
Frozen (2013), i.e. 11 years ago
Let it go.
Same reaction here with Magic: the Gathering, and all their collabs (Marvel is on the horizon-ugh) but still enjoy playing the game. And they’re apparently single-handedly keeping Hasbro afloat.
Funny enough Disney also recently launched their own TCG: Lorcana. A whole new way to leverage that IP!
I’m gonna make a deck that’s just Mountains and Spider-Mans
Disney is at risk of becoming irrelevant? And people are upvoting this take?
As if all the Disney Adults in the world are just going to snap out of it. As if all the children who love Disney stuff currently are going to grow out of it. In what world is this considered an informative and knowledgable take?
Even at its lowest point financially, Disney IP has never been irrelevant at any point.
Just wait until Disney buys Hasbro and watch how bad Magic the Gathering will get then...
Haha you beat me to the punch a little bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39299416
But they have a competing product… for now?
No, Disney uses Unreal for their rendered real-time sets. This is about more than just Fortnite.
Do they still? They used Unreal for the virtual sets in The Mandalorian S1, but for S2 they switched over to a different solution.
https://www.ilm.com/vfx/the-mandalorian/
https://www.ilm.com/vfx/the-mandalorian-season-2/
StageCraft IS Unreal Engine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft
ILM used Unreal Engine to make StageCraft and kept iterating on it until it’s the awesome tech that it is. They have a vested interest in seeing the underlying engine continue to prosper.
StageCraft WAS Unreal Engine; it is not anymore.
StageCraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft
What is Helios?
/? Helios StageCraft https://rebusfarm.net/news/ilm-stagecraft-a-virtual-producti... :
Is there a way to vary the [UE] AutoLOD for longer shots? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38160089
That's not even cinematography! Because there aren't lenses, there are presumably Camera matrices.
Cinematography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematography
Computer graphics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics
"Ask HN: What's the state of the art for drawing math diagrams online?" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38355444 ; generative-manim, manimGPT, BlenderGPT, ipyblender, o3de, how do we teach primary math intuition with the platforms that reach them, how do we Manim in 3 or even 4D?
Manim > "Render with [Blender and/or od3e]" https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/issues/3362
FWIU Disney Games are often built with Panda3d, which works with pygame-web/pygbag in WASM now
Research: "Fabric of the Cosmos", "Cosmos", "How the Universe Works",
Apply [StageCraft (UE5),] computer graphics to STEM education.
A HUD-like [spinning ball trajectory] with observations and symbolic model fitting
Hopefully they will invest in Games that cause STEM (and SEL) learning;
And hopefully they will apply great CGI tools for STEM education
UE5 (and other 4d graphics and physics simulators) automatically reduce the LOD Level-of-Detail for objects in the distance.
Is that LOD parametric with StageCraft software?
(For example, reportedly Cities Skyline 2 is bad slow because they included meshes for characters' teeth and expected AutoLOD to just make it work on the computers kids tend to have. It doesn't work on reasonable machines because the devs all have fast pro GPUs to develop on, so they don't know what the UX is for the average family (that would be happy to turn down the polygon count themselves for what we can learn from the gameplay). Having game devs dogfood with real-world devices that families afford would be good for these firms too.).
Hopefully they'll continue to sell games through non-Epic stores that people have already invested in.
And hopefully, they'll make sure their products work with Proton and thus popular Linux-based handheld gaming devices.
They made a point of highlighting the use of Unreal during the production of Season 1, but then it's completely absent from their discussion of later seasons, instead only referencing an in-house renderer they call Helios. Have they specifically said anywhere that they're still using Unreal Engine?
https://www.ilm.com/industrial-light-magic-to-expand-stagecr...
This 2021 article mentions that external productions using StageCraft services can choose to use either Unreal or Helios for rendering, so the Unreal integration may still be available for those who want it, but obviously ILM didn't write a brand new renderer for the fun of it. Unreal must not have been cutting it for their own productions.
I believe the new version is called StageCraft: Brood War.
Thank you.
I've got a family member that works on production at Lucas, Unreal is still very much a mainstay and not going anywhere.
They're actually expanding their use of it with more virtual sets, mainly because they're now leasing them out a fair bit and need the capacity.
This. Virtual Set Production is almost entirely Unreal engine. Fortnite is just a marketing platform. The real meat is the digital production pipeline that made Mando cool. That enabled Star Trek’s recent series’, and provides a “holodeck” for their just unveiled holo-floor.
I don't think Fortnite is just a marketing platform. They wouldn't have bothered suing Apple and Google over app stores if it were merely a loss leader to remind film execs that Unreal Engine is a thing.
While I agree with you that Fortnite shouldn’t be considered a loss leader, the strategy behind challenging Apple in court is more nuanced. Epic also operates a rather large software/games store and I am sure they would love to see it grow.
I mean they have epic games store that competes with steam on windows. They likely want to be able to the same thing on phones.
Epic has purchased VFX companies in the past, and Unity was eying that market before they imploded recently, making a bunch of acquisitions.
It’s an obvious and huge opportunity for game engine experts to grow their influence.
That would be less expensive.
They use it in their rides as well -- https://web.archive.org/web/20200311075335/https://blogs.nvi...
Disney is the last standing Old Media company.
All other Media and Entertainment companies are either owned by Comcast/AT&T or are Tech companies (netflix, amazon,apple,sony,youtube,tiktokk) that have carved out a chunk of the media and entertainment sector.
Disney is basically on the back foot here, at a time when the attention economy is wrecking chaotic unpredictable havoc on the the media sector.They had to do something cause shareholder revolt has been brewing for a while.
Really? I thought Disney was doing well. Their subscription service is only behind Netflix and Amazon, the latter of which includes its service in Prime so is not an equal competitor. Further, their ownership of Marvel has provided them some of the largest grossing films of all time, and their Star Wars acquisition seems to be paying off. The parks seem to be quite strong, but I've only experienced the Japan ones. Overall I find it difficult, from a layman's perspective, to believe Disney is in trouble but welcome any other information.
See their net income and profit margin trends:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/net-inc...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/profit-...
Doesn’t look so hot for the last 4 or 5 years. They went from earning near $10B per year to less than $3B per year.
If you ignore the Covid drop, the trend change seems to start in 2019 when they bought Century Fox.
I’m not sure what the exact cause is, but for some reason, they lose billions on streaming (page 24):
https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/app/uploads/2023/11/Q4_FY23...
How much of this is real losses and how much is accounting tricks by licensing content from themselves?
I would guess none based on the breakdown on page 10. They would have written in the “Direct to consumer” section that licensing costs were the reason for the losses. Instead, they specified that technology costs and costs to create the media were the tradings for the losses.
Because they give lots of subscriptions away for free and the paying customers are paying a subsidized price.
All so Disney can increase market share. This is why you cant just point to subscriber count as a success indicator.
Thanks, this definitely adds some context. Seems all these acquisitions is costly work.
Because it's drastically cheaper in an obvious dumping exercise, and has some interesting IP kids and grown ups that used to be kids want to (re)watch. However there really isn't that much content on it, nor is new content coming that quickly, so at some point after everything of interest has been seen, people will start unsubscribing.
This is why Netflix is constantly churning out new stuff of very varying quality (utter shit next to masterpieces) - you need to keep people paying the subscription.
This is the root issue with these - people subscribe to Disney+ et al because it has everything (Ariel voice) and then they get bored having watched it all, the kids are satisfied by a single dvd on repeat, so you let the subscription lapse.
I had D+, Prime, and Netflix at one point and now have none.
The DVDs at the library are free, too.
They've had several big box office fails, partially because the Disney+ has been cannibalizing those viewers (why go see it in theaters when I can wait three months and watch it on Disney+ for no additional cost?).
Also they've over saturated the MCU with a million movies and TV shows every year. People have just been burned out on it and they've only recently decided to cut back production on those and be more focused.
ATT sold its media business to Discovery, which is now Warner Bros Discovery, which is old media.
Also, there is still Paramount.
Sony Pictures started in 1987, so that should qualify as old media too.
And there is also Lionsgate.
Disney is by far the biggest and most relevant, though.
Given how much the Discovery arm seems to be in control, Warner Bros Discovery may be "new media" in old media clothing.
Skydance is trying to buy National Amusements to take over Paramount and arguably be a similar new media in old media clothing if that deal goes through.
I know objective that's almost 40 years ago and probably does qualify for old, but that still seems too recent in Hollywood Empires. But Sony Pictures also has the advantage it bought truly old media Columbia/TriStar and didn't seem to kill them and kind of left them to continue to do their thing, so maybe Sony gets more of a pass too.
Lionsgate was formed in 1997.
Maybe you are thinking about MGM (and its famous Lion logo), which Amazon has been trying not to kill since it acquired that ancient studio brand, but also is very much appearing to be Amazon still being Amazon just wearing that brand (which was on life support or already a zombie when purchased) like a skin at this point?
Paramount?
Id say fortnight has quite the ways to go then. Counterstrike and World of Warcraft have 15-20 years headstart and are still going.
I was actually thinking about World of Warcraft when I was thinking about a game that failed to be sticky. World of Warcraft peaked in subscriber count in 2010, and has generally seen steady decline since then. I think the numbers for WoW look worse when you consider how sharply it's share of the video game market has declined. The video game market has ballooned in size while Wow's user base is slowly bleeding out.
It's hard to get accurate data, but Fortnite has roughly 100x more users than World of Warcraft. Counterstrike is an even smaller userbase.
World of Warcraft is no failure by any measure, but it’s not the world-defining explosion it once was.
Existing players keep playing but you rarely hear of new players; at best they may convince old subscribers to return.
Minecraft is also old but seems to be collecting new players decently well.
This isn't about WoW, this is about Disney & Epic. If Fortnite fails to be stickier than WoW then this investment will be pretty bad.
World of Warcraft is probably the stickiest game in history. I can also see how an investment in Blizzard in the year 2010 might have been overly optimistic about WoW's future.
How is Counter Strike small? It has consistently 1.5 million daily players. It's about the same as Fortnite.
A game that has lasted twenty years as a commercial project has definitely not failed to be sticky!
There’s a lot of hope and desire for “forever games” particularly from investors but there is no such thing. They will all have a peak and a steady decline at some stage. Social networks exhibit this pattern as well.
Sure, but even in 2024 this 20-year old game has a paid monthly player count well into the millions. Extremely successful by any measure. And perhaps one of the most profitable game franchises of all time.
On longevity+userbase I think Minecraft and Roblox might have both beat. Both are 15+ years old, with enormous userbases, crucially their userbases include huge numbers of kids.
WoW and Counterstrike have large loyal fanbases, but I'd be surprised if the age of the average user didn't increase by around 1 year per year.
Exactly - a very successful business can be had serving an existing group of customers for life, but eventually it will die out if new blood isn’t entering. Perhaps the only new kids playing WoW are literally children of people who met in the game …
Perhaps.
Perhaps, also, it's the old media playbook interpreting what young people want as "jam advertisements in front of them".
They might achieve this (certainly World of Warcraft holds the title). But I think video games are inherently faddish.
If I had to go one way or the other, I'd bet this is a bit of a desperate move by Disney who are becoming less relevant and whose cash cow (Marvel) is withering.